1 Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Chapter 1 Dynamically Reconfgurable Hardware for Evolving Bio- Inspired Architectures Andres Upegui Haute Ecole d’Ingénierie et de Gestion du Canton de Vaud, Switzerland inTrOducTiOn Living beings have managed to survive on earth for the last four billion years. The main reason for such a success is certainly their striking capacity to adapt to changing and adverse environments. They pos- aBsTracT During the last few years, reconfgurable computing devices have experienced an impressive development in their resource availability, speed, and confgurability. Currently, commercial FPGAs offer the possibility of self-reconfguring by partially modifying their confguration bit-string, providing high architectural fexibility, while guaranteeing high performance. On the other hand, we have bio-inspired hardware, a large research feld taking inspiration from living beings in order to design hardware systems, which includes diverse approaches like evolvable hardware, neural hardware, and fuzzy hardware. Living beings are well known for their high adaptability to environmental changes, featuring very fexible adaptations at several levels. Bio-inspired hardware systems require such fexibility to be provided by the hardware platform on which the system is implemented. Even though some commercial FPGAs provide enhanced reconfgurability features such as partial and dynamic reconfguration, their utilization is still in the early stages and they are not well supported by FPGA vendors, thus making their inclusion diffcult in exist- ing bio-inspired systems. This chapter presents a set of methodologies and architectures for exploiting the reconfgurability advantages of current commercial FPGAs in the design of bio-inspired hardware systems. Among the presented architectures are neural networks, spiking neuron models, fuzzy systems, cellular automata and Random Boolean Networks. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-798-0.ch001